Share this article

The main prize for best creative documentary at the Film Festival and Forum for Human Rights in Geneva went to a German production, which mixed documentary footage with animation.

Mark Wiese’s Camp 14: Total Control Zone film tells the story of a young man born into a camp in North Korea for political prisoners, where his parents were serving a life sentence.

Wiese spent some two years with former prisoner Shin Dong-hyuk, who grew up in an alternative world of executions, beatings and humiliations.

He said: “He spent 24 years in a camp. Under the threat of death penalty it is forbidden to talk about the world outside the camp and the life he spent in the camp – so for 24 years Shin (the main character) did not even know that the world on the other side of the barbed wire could be different.”